The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  Kaya thought that might be even more dangerous.

  “There's got to be somewhere,” Kaya said.

  Cage was clearly in alignment with his sister. That was one thing Kaya had always loved—until the twins ganged up on her. She appreciated that her children liked each other. But damn they were obnoxious and smart, and she was losing this battle.

  “Joule’s right” Cage said now.

  “There’s somewhere… But where is it? I think we should have this argument again, but when we're not just getting in the car and driving into a floodplain or a fire zone, or a supercell tornado area. Once we have a destination in mind.”

  Kaya had found no comeback, nor had Nate. The two of them had climbed into their cars today and gone to work. Joule and Cage had gone back to school with notes for their missing day, though the school had stopped reporting truancy.

  The children told her they had a plan for the afternoon. Kaya wasn't all that keen on the idea, but the goal was to find safe houses throughout the neighborhood. Joule’s attic idea seemed to have worked… at least for one night.

  Kaya wasn't so certain that the dogs wouldn't figure it out. The marks on the walls had been terrifying in their accuracy. Several marks had hit the ceiling right underneath where her daughter was. They had known their prey—her daughter—was just above them.

  If nothing else, at least Joule had been smart enough to pull the cord to the attic stairs up with her. She’d looped it around the board when she yanked the stairs up behind her. Had she not done that, she might not have survived. Kaya always felt her organs freeze when she thought about that. Had Joule not picked the right house, had it not had an attic with stair access, had she not thought to—

  Kaya shut the thoughts down. Joule was okay. She’d survived. The children would be okay. It became a steady mantra.

  Unfortunately, even Kaya couldn’t find a safe place to move. Though she’d looked several times today when she caught a moment, she’d still found nothing. They’d had to shelve the argument.

  She back-calculated what she knew about the dogs. It had been about a year and a half since they had first showed up. That was when the cats started disappearing. Though it was possible the dogs had been around before then, that was the earliest she could be sure of. It was the first sign that they had been out there waiting. Hunting.

  If her math was right, then in a year and a half they had gone from hiding and picking off only the tiniest animals to standing down humans. They now operated in packs that took down police officers, crashed through the windows of cars, broke into homes, and were rumored to fight groups of people. Not big packs of people—the humans hadn’t organized well enough yet to do that—but they had all learned the dogs could withstand a shotgun blast, and even a handful of bullets before beginning to slow down.

  When she found another spare moment away from her experiments, Kaya logged in again and continued her search for someplace safer to move because, deep in her heart, she knew the dogs were getting worse.

  6

  Five days later, nothing had changed except that Kaya’s frustration level had ratcheted up. There was no safer place to move.

  The Earth was basically fighting back against the humans inhabiting it. As one of those humans, Kaya Mazur was desperately trying to keep herself and her kids alive. It was frustrating as all hell that living with the dogs seemed like the best option.

  In the past, Nate had to stop her on more than one occasion from yelling at her TV. They would watch a congressional hearing, and some scientist would testify, “We predict X amount of damage in the next ten years.”

  Of course, Congress would answer back, “But what if you're wrong? What if it isn't in ten years? What if it takes twenty?”

  But Kaya would holler at the TV. “That’s exactly the problem! What if they're wrong? What if it doesn't take ten years? What if it only takes five? What if it only takes two?”

  In the end, it hadn't taken ten years. The scientists had been wrong. They had dramatically overestimated how long it would take once the damage really began occurring. They’d missed that, once it started, it wouldn’t come in linear increases but in exponential waves.

  Three blizzards had howled through the eastern US this year alone, leaving in their wake a massive toll. Lives had been lost. Homes were lost. Jobs were lost and more. It was no longer shocking to anyone that sea level rise had decimated Miami and caused more problems in Florida than could be counted. But what the experts hadn't factored in was how the added water would change the Gulf and how that would affect everything up the Mississippi River. Sea level rise had altered every port city in the US.

  As she searched for places to move her family, Kaya encountered flooding, fires, earthquakes, and more—all on the rise. The dogs, at least, only came out at night. It had been the family’s mistake that they had let Joule out on her own.

  There were easier ways to avoid the dogs than there were to fight tornadoes, blizzards, and floods. So Kaya had walked in the door that night with a scowl on her face.

  “And how was your day?” Cage asked, his sarcasm reflecting off her expression.

  The think tank she'd come here to join had been working on the mechanics of windmills for alternative fuel sources and pumps for natural gas. Since hiring on for the job, it had gone from a dream plan to a survival mode/last ditch effort. Everything at her job had ratcheted up since she’d started. The stress was so much higher, but so were her paychecks and her hours.

  She wanted to cut back. She wanted to spend time with her children. But the fact was, she had to fix the world for her children to live in. “It was the same as every other day. How was school?”

  “I got a one-hundred-and-five on my Latin test,” he said. But that was no surprise to Kaya. “I think Joule did, too.”

  “You had lab today, didn't you?” she asked, as she thumbed through the mail. How was there still junk mail? Who was killing all these poor trees to tell her that her car warranty was about to expire? She looked up just in time to catch Cage’s absent nod. That was a bad sign. “Did you jury rig the experimental setup again?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  He and his sister were no longer allowed to be lab partners in Mrs. Winston's class, something that always made Kaya cringe. She’d never gotten the full details of the event that had warranted that split, but the words “explosion” and “evacuation” had been thrown around. They’d let her children keep attending the school and the class, so Kaya assumed it wasn’t that bad and didn’t ask any more questions.

  She sighed. “Did you get suspended?”

  “Nope,” he replied as Joule walked into the room.

  “Did your brother get suspended for jury rigging the physics lab?” she asked her daughter instead.

  “Nope,” Joule replied, “and neither did I.”

  “Oh, dear god.” Kaya focused back on the mail, looking for anything that could be attended to and finished, unlike her children.

  “You got a minute?” Joule asked her. She held a blueprint-like document rolled up in her hand, making her mother wonder.

  “Sure.” She set her purse into its usual messy spot. Kaya had other things in her life that she did well, but home organization was not one of them. “What do you have?”

  Joule rolled out the document on the table with Cage helping. Using pencils and tiny toys, he weighted down the corners. That, in and of itself, is telling, Kaya thought. Her children still had LEGOs, her daughter loved funny-faced erasers, and her son had found tiny, squishy toy animals for stress relief that he carried in his pocket everywhere. They were still kids. But now those toys anchored blueprints that Kaya could see represented their neighborhood.

  “These houses.” Joule pointed to green highlighter checks on some buildings and orange highlighter x's on others. “These are the ones that have attic access—like the one that I found. I think it's important that we remember these locations in case we need them in the future.”

  Joule di
dn’t say if they needed them because they were caught out late and it was dark—their fault—or if she thought the dogs would evolve and the daylight might no longer be protection enough.

  “How many still have neighbors living in them?” Kaya asked. A reasonable portion of the neighborhood had disappeared. She didn't like to think about how many had been eaten and how many had been smart enough to leave.

  “That's the blue.” Joule pointed out as she traced a finger around the outside of the homes that still had people living in them.

  “Do we tell them about the attic access?” Kaya asked, knowing her kids understood she meant should they tell them how valuable it might be?

  Normally, her own answer would have been Yes, just go tell them it was an option. But she’d tried to do that before, when her family first noticed it was the darkness that brought the dogs out. Some of the neighbors had been rude, saying they’d already figured that out. Kaya had expected as much, but was hoping to open a line of communication. Several had rebuffed her, suggesting she was crazy and that they just started going to bed early for almost no reason. The denial was shocking.

  In her more generous moments, she understood that the anger and denial were forms of self-preservation. People were reacting to the dogs and the horrific consequences of minor errors. In her less generous moments, Kaya imagined just shrugging at them when they asked if she’d seen their beloved dog Taffy. Now, she was simply reluctant to knock on doors and share information.

  “So we have three houses on our street with probable safe spaces.” Kaya told the kids. “That’s good to know. But how long do we have before the dogs figure out how to get into the attics?”

  “We don't know,” Cage replied with an easy shrug that belied the severity of the situation. “They seem to be evolving relatively quickly—at least in their actions. No one's ever caught one to see what they look like. So there’s not a good way to predict when they’ll get to that point.”

  Kaya started to open her mouth. Then she closed it, not wanting to give the kids any ideas. “So what's our alternative? What if the attics don’t work?”

  “Well.” Cage smiled and used a tone that almost said I'm glad you asked. What he actually said next was, “Come outside. We’ll show you.”

  7

  Cage led his mother into the backyard, knowing his sister would follow. The two of them stood in the middle of the open space, an area they had once talked about for a puppy. Now, they looked around.

  His mother put her hands on her hips, and clearly she'd had a shittier day than she'd lead on by her tone earlier. This more matched her facial expression when she'd come in the door. “Faraday Carson Mazur, what did you do?”

  “Hey,” he replied. “Don't full-name me.” They'd always called him “Cage.” His two physicist parents had thought it was funny to have a kid named Faraday and call him Cage when he was an infant. However, it had stuck, and Cage wasn't a bad name to go by. Every now and then, when he told someone his first name was actually Faraday, they grinned. That’s when Cage knew he had found his people.

  “All right,” Kaya said, looking back and forth between the two kids, because clearly they had both been involved. “What did you do?”

  Cage waved his hand across the open space of the backyard. “Look at the trees. Which ones can you climb to escape the dogs?”

  His mother looked back and forth and he watched her thinking. Eventually, she answered. “None of them.”

  “Right. Why not?”

  One by one, she pointed to each tree, listing its problems. “That one is so bushy that even if I got up into it the dogs would follow me right up. It’s too easy to climb.” She pointed again. “That one's got a nice clean trunk, but it’s not very tall. It’s young and probably wouldn't hold my weight.” She turned and pointed to the far corner, where the biggest trees grew. “The ones that are tall enough… well, I don’t think I could get up into them. The problem is, if the dogs can’t reach the bottom branches, probably neither can I.”

  “Exactly,” Joule said from behind them. Cage turned, and he and Kaya both realized why it had taken her a few extra minutes to come out. Joule had half a gummy worm hanging out of her mouth.

  As Cage watched, his mother opened her mouth—probably to suggest that gummy worms weren't a good afternoon snack—but Joule beat her to it. “I just ate a handful of carrots. And I've only got two worms. Also, that's exactly the problem with the trees.”

  Nice redirect, Sis. “Well,” he offered in his best infomercial announcer voice. “Do you have problems getting away from dogs? Trees not going to hold your weight? Are the low branches too high up? Well, let us introduce the Dog Ladder 2000.”

  Kaya raised one eyebrow at him, but at least a little of the sourness left her expression. “Go on.”

  “Right now,” he continued in his usual voice. “What we have are ladders hanging from the trees. We've got them on a pully system. So, come on.” He motioned, and they all walked to the far side of one of the larger trees.

  He and Joule had hung it on the other side, thinking that if they had need of it, it would be because they couldn't get to the house. Thus, the ladder should be on the far side. “See? We can climb up into the tree and pull the ladder up behind us.”

  With a motion to his sister, Joule—who had a tail of a gummy worm still hanging out of her mouth—went right up the ladder. At the top, she turned and pulled it up.

  “There are two modifications we want,” she hollered down to their mom. “The first is that it needs to come up right behind you, not wait until you hit the top. It would suck to be halfway up, or three quarters up, and then a dog gets on the bottom rungs and pulls it down. And you with it.

  “The other problem is that we don't want to leave them hanging down all the time. I'm sure the dogs will destroy them, and it may very well give them ideas to climb trees. So what we actually need is a ladder that we can pull down only when we need them.”

  She was nodding to her brother, and Cage continued to describe the modifications they had talked about earlier. “It has to work all the time, every time. Because if you yank on it and it doesn't come down ... well, that’s not going to be okay.”

  What he didn't say was, If the ladder didn't come down, you were dead. If you had decided your best chance was to climb a tree, then not only were dogs chasing you, but they were close. A runner wasn’t going to have time to pick another tree, and Cage didn't know how many trees he could put ladders in.

  Kaya was nodding. “I wonder if there's maybe a way to have it on you and then throw the ladder up into the tree…”

  Cage nodded. “We thought about that. Firefighters have hook ladders that they throw. But those are dependent on having an orthogonal top on a roof. The trees just don't have flat edges to hook. Even if you had a branch you could catch the ladder on, you would be climbing in midair, rather than braced as you went up the trunk. Also, there are a number of other branches in the way. I would assume that would mean getting it up correctly in the first place would be difficult.”

  Joule, swallowing the tail of her gummy worm, added in, “I can't imagine throwing a ladder when I was stressed.”

  Cage didn't comment, but he took her statement at face value. His sister knew what it was to run from the dogs. If she didn't think she could throw a ladder into a tree, he wasn't going to press it.

  “Well, okay,” Kaya said. “I think they're all really good ideas. I think you're right and it just needs a little more work. Once we get it figured out, maybe we should talk to the neighbors about it.”

  Joule rolled her eyes and Cage seconded the thought, if not the action. Some of the neighbors were asshats.

  “It's really good work guys,” his mother said. “And we're never going to lose track of a family member again. I'm so sorry, Joule.”

  Joule swiped her hand as if to wave her mother off. Not to dismiss the situation or the ensuing trauma, but to convey the idea that it wasn't her parents’ fault. Cage knew they ea
ch felt individually guilty about Joule being out when the clouds had come in. No one had known that the dogs coming out at dusk didn’t necessarily mean “as the sun set” but “as the darkness came.” But he understood his parents’ guilt, because he felt it, too.

  “Still, it's a good start,” Kaya told them as the kids dismissed her and she turned to walk into the house.

  Cage caught his sister's eyes behind their mother’s back. There was more work to be done. Just not things he was going to tell his mother about. Not yet.

  8

  Kaya worked from home the next day. The children were out of school for teacher training. It was weird, she thought, the way things continued on as though they were normal.

  There was no FEMA funding to deal with the dogs. The government agencies were stretched far too thin, busy cleaning up after actual natural disasters. There was nothing left to help with the dogs. Rowena Heights was in one of the nicer parts of the city, and their city didn't have tornadoes. They didn't have flooding or earthquakes, at least not the big ones.

  This neighborhood had been sought-after when they first moved in. It had taken both Kaya’s and Nate’s salaries to qualify for the mortgage on the initial value of the house. Then, as the disasters started encroaching on other areas of the US, and considering what was going on now… Kaya wasn't sure what it was worth. She hadn’t looked it up and wouldn’t trust a number she got anyway. No one wanted to move where the dogs were.

  “We’re heading out.” Cage’s voice pulled her from her irritated reverie. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder and held a brown paper bag in his hand. When she motioned to it with her eyes, he said, “Lunch,” and shook the bag a little bit, as though to demonstrate there was something inside it. Not that she had doubted her son would take extra food with him wherever he went.